Abilene, Texas hail storm losses likely to hit US$400 million

The Insurance Council of Texas (ICT) predicts that the June 12 hail storm that hit Abilene will produce US$400 million in insured losses to vehicles, homes and commercial property.

“This is the worst storm damage I’ve seen in my 41 years in the insurance business,” Leroy Perkins of the Perkins Insurance Agency in Abilene, notes in a statement from ICT, the largest state insurance trade association in the United States.

It adds that the storm is the second catastrophic hail storm experienced in the west Texas city over the past three years.

ICT reports the storm, packing baseball-sized hail, moved directly south across Abilene pounding the city’s north side and downtown area. Commercial buildings downtown received millions of dollars in damage to roofs, windows and structures. Total uninsured losses are also expected to be high, Perkins adds.

“Downtown looks like fall because all of the trees have been stripped of their leaves and many limbs down in the street,” Karla Martin with the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in an ICT statement the day after the storm.

ICT spokesperson Mark Hanna notes that Abilene was hit by softball-sized hail on Easter Sunday in 2011 and the 2014 storm was worse.“ Hundreds of vehicles, many of them new cars, were declared totalled from the beating they took,” Hanna points, adding that insured losses from damaged cars and trucks alone “will exceed US$100 million.”

Information from the U.S. National Weather Service notes that property damage related to hail (includes the 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands) was approximately US$1.4 billion in 2009, US$924 million in 2010, US$450 million in 2011, US$2.4 billion in 2012, and US$1.2 billion in 2013.

Figures from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) notes that hail causes approximately US1$ billion in damage to crops and property each year, notes a backgrounder from the Insurance Information Institute (III).

Statistics culled from NOAA’s Severe Storms database show there were 5,457 major hail storms in 2013, with the largest number of severe hail storms occurring in May (1,376 storms), June (1,145 storms), and July (750 storms), III reports. Texas had the largest number of severe hail events in 2013, followed by Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota.